Finally...

At last, something comes up to raise me from my torpor. Well, not torpor exactly, but a combination of playing my health care worker card and an overdose of the domestic arts.

Chris Hayes was right to question the obscene overuse of the word "hero" to describe our troops and was far too hasty in apologising. Trouble was, he was right for the wrong reason.

In the unlikely event that anyone unfamiliar with these pages reads this, the disclaimer is that I am a veteran, had some interesting times, and know what a hero is because I've seen several in action...most of them not combat troops. I would love to know what proportion of Hayes' critics were veterans. Considering that something under two percent of Americans have ever served in the armed forces, the math is suggestive.

To be uncomfortable with this because it seems "rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war," either misses the point of this outpouring or is awash in denial. There is an elephant in the room, people. Its name is the collective guilt of millions of Americans over the way we (yes, fools, we) of the Vietnam era were treated in uniform and after we served. It is easier to get the keycard combination to Fort Knox than to get anyone wallowing in this guilt to admit it. It is much easier for them to exercise some transference and go overboard over today's servicefolk. That is why these people call everyone from Lieutenant Generals to the company cook "heroes."

Props to President Obama for speaking the words that none of the salivating chickenhawks and few if any pundits will say aloud: that the treatment of Vietnam veterans is a national shame, It is past time to put that right.

I give today's veterans their due. Like many of my generation I carry the memory of being sneered at by veterans of previous wars, and I'm determined not to do the same to those in uniform today. But overreaction to these veterans doesn't do a goddam thing to square things with veterans of that previous and troubled time.

How about it, America? Grow a spine, or a pair, or whatever it takes to create some balance between past and present. Forty-one years on, and I'm used to this shit, but it would be nice to have something besides pro forma thanks twice a year.

A final note for the 99 percent, non-veterans. Kindly spare us the "thank you for your service" platitudes on Memorial Day. Veteran's Day, yes, but Memorial Day isn't for those of us still living. It's for those who didn't live.

Memorial Day, 2011

First, today's fall from grace award goes to the anonymous hackers who attacked various PBS Web sites because Front Line had dared to broadcast a show on Wikileaks that fell short of adulation. This is precisely why my contempt for Julian Assange and his minions remains strong. Freedom of information means nothing if its self-appointed defenders pick and choose what information shall be free.

The local Memorial Day show followed much the same script as in past years. This town has a three-stop parade. The first stop is the harbour, where the town remembers those whose gave their lives at sea, navy, merchant marine and privateer: there are long memories here, and it wouldn't do to leave the privateers out of our thoughts. The main event, which I take in, is at the Memorial Park downtown. This is the one dominated by a sombre Civil War obelisk, which bears more names than all the other memorials combined.

This the beginning of the Civil War sesquicentennial. If we manage to get through the next four years without starting another one, perhaps we can use the time to recognise the seed of what the war started, and to settle some things that were far from settled at the centennial.

Against this background, I was disappointed in our keynote speaker, a young Marine reserve officer raised in Marblehead. There is a lot of material to draw from here. We did not especially need a political sermon strongly tinged with Tea Party rant. Although that the town has a decidedly Republican cast, I detected an uptick in shuffling and shifting in the crowd. Not the place, old man.

Forty years ago one would not have predicted that veterans' organisations would have been inherited by veterans of my generation. Then, I would have predicted that those organisations would wither and die rather than treat Vietnam veterans on equal terms. I have never forgotten or forgiven that. I will show up at such events but that is as far as I'll take it. But here we are, old men and women, and the older men and women of World War Two and Korea are dying at a prodigious rate. We are the old ones: may the fates grant us one insight denied to veterans of "the greatest generation." What Holmes called "the incommunicable experience of war" unites us all. We are related to the deeps of time, far past Thucydides, before Marathon. May we be fair-minded and generous to those who are behind the guns today.

Both ends of a fine spring day

I've been reading that Federal general John Logan, as head of the Grand Army of the Republic, chose (originally) May 30 as Decoration Day because it commemorated no anniversary date of any Civil War battle. He hoped to leave the door open for common observance and eventually succeeded.

It must be a sign of age that I have made a habit of showing up for at least a part of our town's Memorial Day ceremonies.

The mind of a veteran goes very far away from the here and now during these things. My strange little Foggy Bottom ceremony a couple of years ago has, oddly enough, laid to rest the worst of the memories that had troubled me for more than 30 years. But one can't put on a navy ball cap with insignia, stand to parade rest or attention, render a salute, without remembering one's own experiences. The volley salute, in our town, is offered by an 18th C. re-enactment group. It's a reminder of how loud musket fire was, and how long it took between volleys. It's also vaguely disturbing that the death toll of veterans of what we coyly call "the Vietnam era" keeps going up.

The park where the keynote ceremony takes place is dominated by a silent obelisk to the fallen of the Civil War. There are smaller monuments to other wars around it. You need no skills but arithmetic to understand why this is the largest. Our media moan today because as of this weekend we have lost 1000 service personnel in nine years of war in Afghanistan. Our threshold of horror keeps shrinking. Skipping the intervening wars, that would have been the death toll of a single minor league Civil War action...in one day. The obelisk, with its many score of fallen from one town, reminds us of that.

Just as well then that there were other things to do after paying the respects. Our trip to Yosemite is less than three months off. Practice is in order if we mean to a) enjoy it and b) come home alive. The nearest place with anything like sustained technical hiking is the Blue Hills Reservation, south of Boston. We contrived to get down there at a quiet moment in traffic, to put in (on my second trip and my wife's first) over three surprisingly vigourous hours of hiking, and to get back ahead of the slavering* mob of irate Cape Cod weekenders.

Here's another definition of "technical" hiking. It is hiking where you are on your hands and feet, but have not left the vertical. It is also hiking in the presence of six circling vultures, all of whom show an uncommon interest in your state of health.

(*"Slavering" is excessive, you say? Clearly, you have never been stuck in a seven to ten mile traffic jam of people trying to leave the Cape Cod holiday paradise right now. Most victims of these jams store up about six months worth of road rage in one afternoon.)